The Far Side Read online

  A motor started humming and Kris could see a rubber belt about four feet long and about eight inches wide, start to move. There were three comb-like gizmos along it that in the bad light of the closet had started glowing blue.

  Escaping electrons, Kris thought. Andie knows that I’m a genius too... but even so, Kris knew she wasn’t in the same class as Andie.

  “Right now,” Andie explained, “not much is going on. Call it de-fucking-tuned. Now I’m going to crank up that rotating magnetic field. Think of it as something like what a generator generates, except this fucker is virtual -- no moving parts. I can get the fuckin’ shaft rotation one fuckin’ lot faster than you can get a real shaft to turn.”

  Again, there was nothing visible -- just Andie studying gauges and dials. The device’s most noisy part was the motor turning the rubber belt of the Van de Graaff.

  Kris sighed. Andie had built her first Van de Graaff as a freshman. She’d gotten permission, after a demonstration, to build a larger version in their high school’s rotunda. The principal should have known better!

  Everyone in school had been there when Andie turned it on. The rotunda was thirty feet high and a hundred feet in diameter. The first lighting bolt had been fifteen feet tall and had scared the pee out of half the students present. Literally.

  It had been like a bad science fiction movie, lighting bolts striking at random after that, around the room. Kris had seen Andie turn it off, and so she had stood stock still. She’d been hit by one of the bolts, but she wasn’t grounded. Microamps. She grinned at the memory. Every hair on her body, including her shoulder-length hair, had stood on end. Andie had said she not only had her hair on end, but she had been glowing blue as her body shed excess electrons. Kris had refused Andie’s request to try for a photograph before they made Andie tear the machine down.

  “Okay, here goes, Kris. Please, suspend disbelief.”

  Kris wasn’t sure if she was surprised more to hear two sentences ‘fuck free’ as it were, or what Andie had said.

  Something flickered in front of her. It was blue, about six or seven feet tall, just a bit smaller than the closet’s ceiling and about four feet wide, about two-thirds of the closet’s width.

  It shimmered like a glowing blue curtain, blowing in the wind. After a second it stopped “blowing in the wind” and settled down to a simple blue rectangle.

  “I can’t remember what the name of a section of a sphere’s surface is, but that’s what this is, only projected on a plane,” Andie said, continuing her matter-of-fact explanation.

  “It a projection of the surface of the reaction chamber, expanded from three feet to six plus. I have no idea why the vertical dimension is expanded at a different scale.”

  “It looked like fabric, blowing in a breeze,” Kris offered.

  “I thought that too. But...”

  The blue surface seemed solid. “I swear, Kris, I’m not stupid. I stuck a broom into it first.”

  Kris jerked her head around and stared at Andie. “I swear, Kris, I had no idea what was going on, but I was careful. Still, you know me -- I have to try anything new.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I put my hand into it. I felt nothing unusual. Nothing. The broom handle went and returned and looked normal. I decided, ‘fuck it!’ and put my head through.”

  Kris felt faint. She couldn’t have done that for all the tea in China. Actually, she couldn’t have done that at all, no matter what the reward.

  Andie went on, as matter of fact as she always was, but without her favorite word.

  “I can’t describe it. I mean, literally, I can’t. I couldn’t feel anything different from if I’d stuck my head through a door. A big nothing. Well, almost nothing, because it was black as the ace of spades on the other side.”

  "Andie, you might think you're sane, but your not."

  Andie laughed. "Yeah, I thought you'd say that. Which is why you are here with your camera." She pointed at the camera. "I built a light bar. We're going to hang the camera and light bar on the broomstick and try again."

  "That sounds sensible," Kris told her friend earnestly.

  Andie laughed. "Remember back in seventh grade? They explained about masturbation to us in school. We'd both heard about it before then, and both of us had tried it without success. You ran home after school and tried it again. After that you told me that you don't like masturbation because you lose control."

  Kris blushed. "Yeah."

  "Well, my friend, now you're eighteen and I'll be that in a couple of days. Sex is legal for you, and soon it'll be for me. I never said anything to you that day or since... but you have to know I've tried it a bunch of times. I lose control every time I rub myself. Me, I like the feeling of being out of control. You're afraid of it."

  "I don't like to lose control," Kris said with the dignity that she could muster, but knowing she sounded defensive.

  "I know, Kris. Me... it's who I am. You also told me once that your idea of heaven was to die in bed, at home, when you're a million years old, your extended family around you."

  "I was younger then."

  "But you meant it."

  "Yeah." Actually, Kris had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, but she did know that she wanted to keep Andie from killing the both of them -- so she’d said that in the hopes it would tone down of Andie’s ideas. It hadn’t, so far as Kris had noticed.

  “And we both know I’m not going to die in bed,” Andie said matter-of-factly.

  "Kris, we can do the same experiment we've done since fourth grade when you grew six inches and I didn't. We can go in my bathroom, stand next to each other and look in the mirror. There you'll be, and I need a stool for you to see me.

  "You know it and I know it. We're different you and I."

  "Yes," Kris admitted. "I've never thought it was a bad thing."

  "I think it's a good thing," Andie told her. "So, sure, I put my head through there -- once. Now I'm going to risk your camera."

  For fifteen minutes the two of them worked, Kris mostly supervising. It was no surprise to find that Andie was a wizard with duct tape.

  They pushed the camera into and through the blue glow. After a minute, they pulled the camera back and looked at the replay.

  Kris was silent while the tape played and only at the end did she look at Andie. "It looks like a cave."

  “Yeah, that’s what it looks like. No light, that’s for sure, but lots of rocks.”

  Kris studied the camera and light and then looked at Andie. “You want to put more than your head through.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “And what happens if this thing of yours breaks?”

  “I’m fucked,” Andie said, her voice steady. “I don’t have a death wish, Kris, but I have a huge bump of curiosity.”

  “What’s your plan?” Andie always had a plan, no matter how much she looked or sounded like she didn’t.

  “I’m going to take the broom and light bar with me and a flashlight in my pocket. I’m going through and I’ll look around and take a few better pictures than what we’ve gotten so far. There’s some white liquid shoe polish on my dresser. I’m going to move ahead to this rock,” she pointed to one frozen on the playback screen, “and paint a happy face on it.

  “Then I’m coming back and we’ll turn the thing off and then back on.”

  “You want to know if you’re coming back to the same place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if there’s no air there?”

  “Well,” Andie said reached into a drawer and tossing a rolled up pair of socks through the blue door, “if there wasn’t before, there is now.”

  Kris nodded, Andie’s point made. “Two minutes, Kris, that’s all,” Andie remonstrated.

  “Do me a favor and as soon as you go through, try talking to me.”

  Andie laughed. “Yeah, that’s a good experiment! I didn’t think of that one! You should be able to hear me as good as if I was in the next room.�
� She laughed again. “Theory says.”

  It took a few minutes to get things organized and then without hesitation, Andie stepped through it. Try as she might, Kris couldn’t hear anything from Andie. “I can’t hear you, Andie,” Kris said loudly.

  Andie stuck her head through the blue door. It looked decidedly odd. “You hear me?”

  “No, and I don’t think you heard me just now, either.”

  “Nothing,” Andie agreed. “I didn’t feel anything special, going through. No dizziness, no nausea, nothing. Just like walking into the kitchen from the dining room.

  “There’s a mild breeze here, coming from left. I don’t think it’s associated with the door. I’m going to mark the rock now. I’ll toss the shoe polish back to you when I’m done.”

  Andie’s head vanished.

  A few seconds later the shoe polish bottle came flying out and Kris almost caught it. A moment later Andie reappeared, a rock in her hand. She handed the rock to Kris and started shutting the machine down. The blue door took on its curtain appearance, shimmered and then vanished.

  Kris lofted the rock. “Eeew, now I have space alien boogers on my hands!”

  Andie laughed. “Any space alien that bites you is going to make a face, roll over and die, Kris.”

  Kris stuck her tongue out. “You’re so smart, you look at the rock. It’s full of fossils.”

  Andie leaned close and she could see them too. They looked like little clams. Andie ran her fingernail over the surface of the rock. “This looks like limestone. One sec.”

  She turned around and vanished into the rest of the house. A moment later Andie was back with a small plastic bowl for soup or ice cream and a bottle of vinegar. She put the rock in the bowl and dribbled the vinegar on the rock. Bubbles immediately appeared.

  “Yeah, calcium carbonate,” Andie said. “Limestone. About what you’d expect in a cave. I was in Carlsbad once, it was fuc..., umm, it was pretty cold in there. This cave was much warmer.”

  “You almost fucked up there,” Kris said trying not to grin.

  “Watch your mouth, girl!” Andie said and the two of them burst out laughing. “Sometimes I let my hair down with my best friend. Don’t you go messing up my act by trying to get in on it yourself!”

  Kris looked at her watch. “Andie, it’s almost nine and tomorrow is a school day.”

  Andrea scoffed. “Like two weeks before graduation, who cares?”

  “Andie, you told me once the reason why you have a perfect attendance record is to show up everyone else.”

  “That was pure luck. Who could count on getting both measles and chicken pox in the summer?”

  “But it means something to you. And you know you want to give that speech.”

  “You should have seen Principal Stone’s face when I gave him my first draft!”

  Kris grimaced. That had been Andie at her vulgar best. The second draft, where she’d inserted “Praise Jesus!” every place she’d had “fuck” or “shit” before hadn’t been any better received.

  The final draft had two versions -- the one Dr. Stone saw and approved -- a plea for continuing to learn, and the other was the same plea with a pithy sentence at the end. Kris wasn’t sure just how many people were going to understand, “So long and thanks for all the fish!” but that sentiment expressed Andie’s true opinion of the school -- even if the school was a top technical preparatory, students drawn exclusively from the children of the rich and the super rich.

  Andie busied herself in her closet getting the machine started again until the flapping blue curtain stabilized once more. She promptly stuck her head through it, flashlight in hand and laughed as she pulled back. “Well, there’s still a happy face there!” She snapped off the flashlight, grinning from ear to ear.

  As fast as she’d started it up again, she was now turning it back off. Andrea turned to Kris. “Okay, I know you’re a worry wart.”

  “Am not!”

  “Are too!” They both laughed.

  “I am going to leave this off until tomorrow morning, where I will turn it on briefly to make sure there’s still a happy face in the cave. I will be on time for school and I’ll have my happy face on there, too.

  “But, after school, you have to promise me, you’re going to come home with me and we’re going to work on this, including the report.”

  “Ummm... Andie... do you know why I was gone this weekend?”

  “You said your old man wanted you to work one of the cameras.”

  “Yeah, and that’s what I did. I didn’t mention why.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Andie, he seduced me with the dark side of the force.”

  Andie laughed. “For a second there, you had me going when you said, ‘he seduced me...’”

  “I’ve worked a couple of times on weekends and after school for him on this. He says I have enough time on set to meet the minimums for screen credit. I’m going to get one on this movie.”

  “That’s the romantic comedy movie set in Tarzana?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “Gosh, I’m impressed.” Andie didn’t sound very impressed.

  “First steps, Andie. First steps. I know it sounds stupid, but I love to do things with the camera.”

  “I know, Kris. I don’t think it’s so much stupid, though, as crassly commercial.”

  “And chasing after a Nobel Prize isn’t crass?”

  “Two, maybe three of the little fuckers,” Andie reminded her. “Yeah, okay, I guess it’s crass. And it sure as fuck is commercial, because ya’ get almost a million bucks with each one!”

  Andie had never hidden her dream of being financially independent from her father. Her father had won his money in the lottery and literally, he didn’t care about money any more. He’d bought an expensive house, and he’d bought a PT Cruiser to drive. He didn’t travel except to a sports bar he used to hang out in up in Tujunga, where he drank with his buddies and talked sports.

  Andie’s father was making $12,000 a day in interest and, Andie had told Kris, he didn’t think twice about spending a couple of hundred bucks buying everyone in the bar a round of drinks a couple of times a night. Andie didn’t dwell on it, but she’d got her father to put a million bucks for her into a trust fund, and when she had offers from every top school in the country, a second million for college.

  Her father closed out the bar most every night and slept until noon. Kris’s own father had laughed at Kris’s description. “You think he’s a bad father.”

  “He’s inattentive. Andie has to do everything for herself.”

  “Kris, she’d shit a brick if he started interfering in her life. If he paid attention to what she was doing, he wouldn’t understand half of it and he knows it -- and Andrea wouldn’t like it, either. Andrea complains about him loudly, but the fact is, she wouldn’t have it any differently.”

  Since that was true, Kris had thought long and hard about it. She was Andie’s friend, but Kris knew she was Andie’s friend on Andie’s terms, not her own. It wasn’t that Andie was cruel or mean -- she just wanted to be in control. The fact was that no one else made Kris laugh like Andie did, and no one else did the whacky things Andie did either.

  She and Andie had gone on hot air balloon rides, ridden gliders high up into the air over the Sierra Nevada Mountains... They had in fact, walked the length of those mountains, climbed some of them, including Mt. Whitney, and skied down others. They had a short bit of weightlessness in the private jet of a friend of Kris’s father...

  Everyone else thought Andie was suicidal, but Kris had figured out that Andie actually was pretty conservative when it came to things like that. Sure, they’d learned to scuba dive when they were fourteen and they met for the first time when they were ten and learning to ride horses.

  Yeah, it was crazy, it was wild, but the truth was it was fun and not really dangerous. Her father had made her explain why she wanted to do each and every one of those crazy things but he’d always nodded agree
ment when she finished.

  Kristine had been sixteen before she finally figured it out. Sure, most kids didn’t do the things they did. But the fact remained that while this or that might have been considered adventurous, they weren’t really dangerous. Sure, you could fall off a horse and get hurt, you could have trouble with your scuba gear -- all of that. But you could fall in your own shower, too. People got run over in the crosswalk all the time.

  Andie thought the pause was something else. “I promised, okay?”

  “I know. See you tomorrow.”

  Kris picked her cell phone off her belt to call her dad for a ride, but it was deader than a doornail. Andie went and got hers off the nightstand and the two girls looked at each other as Andie hit the speed dial. “Evidently cell phones don’t do well close to intense magnetic fields,” Andie said apologetically as she handed Kris the phone.

  Kris told her father where she was and he agreed he’d be there in a few minutes. Give or take. Making a left turn onto Laurel Canyon often required a bit of patience. On the other hand, walking in the afternoon was one thing, walking on Laurel Canyon after dark was an invitation to trouble.

  He pulled up in the circular driveway and Kris waved to Andie and shortly she was home.

  “You’re sure Andrea is going to give a PG valedictory?” her father asked as they walked to the house.

  “Sure, she’s secretly proud that they’re letting her do this, given her basic nature.”

  Her father laughed. “She’ll do something off the wall.”

  “’So long and thanks for all the fish,’” Kris quipped.

  “That’s rich!” he exclaimed. “She will, won’t she?”

  “Yeah. Even if hardly any of them will know the reference, and even the few who recognize where the quote is from, won’t get it.”

  The two shared conspiratorial grins.

  * * *

  A while later Kris’s mother came home and plopped herself down on a chair in the living room. Kris looked over at her and smiled. Kris and her father got along... but her mother had been distant for as long as Kris could remember.

  “Mom?” Kris asked, while her father was off fetching his wife a glass of wine.